The Beautiful Uncut Hair of Graves
by Solstice Zero
Summary: Ianto and Gwen, and grief and rain and grass. Gwen and Ianto friendship. Spoilers for 2.13 Exit Wounds.


_A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;  
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.  
_-Walt Whitman

Gwen didn't know where Ianto went, sometimes. She just knew that he would leave. She'd raise her head from whatever she was doing, and there would be no suit jacket moving away from her, no tap of his shoes on the catwalks. He had been quiet and close, lately, almost constantly present at the Hub, filling needs without being noticed that way that he had in the beginning, before – everything. After Tosh and Owen, he had closed down again, and no amount of careful reaching would bring him out to her, as though nothing had happened between them since the time he was nothing but a butler. And from the way that Jack watched Ianto move back and forth across the Hub, his frown hovering under his worried eyes as Ianto performed his allotted tasks silently and with his own distant expression, Gwen knew that Jack was having no more luck than she was in trying to reach him.

And sometimes, Ianto was just gone. He would disappear, once a week or every two weeks, as though in a puff of smoke, and no amount of speculation could produce a reasonable answer for where he might have gone. The fridge and cupboards were well stocked. There were no rift emergencies, or even minor events. There was never any reason at all for him to be missing, and yet his car would be absent from the parking garage, and his workstation empty. She'd asked Jack, once, where Ianto went, but he hadn't known. That same worry clouded his eyes, and she'd left his office quickly, because there was something moving underneath all of this quiet subterfuge, and she didn't know if she could handle something that made Jack look like that. Of anyone, Jack.

But she caught him, once, just before he left. The way he suddenly froze at his workstation, just leaning over it to look something up, not even sitting down. The tensing of his shoulders and the sharpness of his expression as he stared at the screen. Then he straightened up and walked away, and she watched him from the corner of her eye as he went directly to the rolldoor and out, the alarms flashing behind him as he went. In the space of thirty seconds, the time it took for the lift to bring Ianto to the hall behind the tourist office, Gwen decided: she would follow him.

She gave him a ten minute head start and followed in the SUV, because there was a tracking device in every car connected to Torchwood (even, she knew, the lorries Rhys managed), and they were all accessed through the SUV's satnav. She was well trained in the art of subtly tailing a car, but Ianto was well trained in the art of noticing when he was being followed. This was the trouble of working for the same top-secret government organization. It was difficult to spy on a person who knew every trick and every countertrick. So he had ten minutes on her, and when the blinking yellow circle on the satnav turned into the cemetery and didn't move again, Gwen's stomach bottomed out, and she regretted her own curiosity.

Ianto had left to visit Tosh's grave.

Gwen pulled into the cemetery's gravel car park and did not make any attempt to get out of the SUV. She stared across at the lot at Ianto's car, the slow vines of guilt gradually tightening around her stomach and her heart. She had not been here yet. She'd gone to Tosh's funeral, with Jack and Ianto and Martha and Tosh's family, Tosh's mother beautiful and crying and so foreign, Gwen had thought, so foreign, and not even because of her nationality. Because of her grief, she was foreign. Her careful, beautiful grief. And the sight of her there, with her real and uninformed emotion at her daughter's death, had scared Gwen so badly, had made her feel so disconnected and so entrenched in her own incredibly unlikely life that she had never returned to Tosh's gravesite. Because she could never be the kind of mourner Tosh deserved. Because she could never love Tosh as much as she wanted to, now that Tosh was gone. That kind of love, now, would certainly destroy her.

She turned off the SUV and stepped out with a crunch of gravel.

Gwen found Ianto sitting at the base of Tosh's grave. He was cross-legged, looking slightly ridiculous in such a childish position, wearing a three piece suit and surrounded by acres of well-kept grass, broken only by flat grey stones with metal plaques.

TOSHIKO SATO  
1975-2009_  
Mame de iyo_  
_mi wa narawashi no_  
_kusa no tsuyu._

Ianto's long fingers were raking absently through the grass beside his knee as he stared down at the plaque. "You followed me."

"I'm sorry," she said, and she was. She walked up next to him. "What does it mean?"

"I don't know the literal translation," he said. He looked at his hand as it flattened the grass it had been raking. "But I looked it up and found an English version. 'Farewell, I pass as all things do, dew on the grass.'"

Gwen said nothing, but she sat next to him, her knees up and her arms wrapped around her calves.

"It's the death haiku of a Japanese poet called Banzan. He wrote it, then died." Ianto started to tug at the grass lightly, as if daring it to break off between his fingers. "That was apparently a thing people did back then."

Gwen wondered if the poem fit Tosh. _Farewell, I pass as all things do._

_I just wanted to say – it's okay. It really is._

Gwen took in a shaking breath, then let it out. "It works," she said quietly.

Ianto nodded. Tugged harder at the grass. "It works."

They sat in silence for a while. The sky was dark with clouds when Gwen looked up, and there was the metallic taste of lightning, a storm coming. The air was heavy with impending rain. "Why did you come here?" she asked without preamble. They were past that. They were past the translations. "Is this where you've been coming?"

"Yes." He drew his hand back into his lap, his eyes unmoving from the plaque before them. "I don't know why," he said. "I just feel I have to, sometimes. When her name comes up in connection to past cases, or I notice her developer signature while running a program, and it hits me that she's gone. It isn't every time. But sometimes. Sometimes she's just gone again."

Gwen reached out toward his arm, and when he didn't move away, she laid her hand there, rubbing her thumb back and forth against the grey material of his suit jacket. She hated suddenly that there seemed to be a mile between the tips of her fingers and the body she touched. When Tosh and Owen had died, they had taken her Ianto with them. The Ianto that slept on her couch when he drank too much watching terrible movies in her flat when Rhys was out. The Ianto with whom she shared the burden of Torchwood and all of the things that came with it, the two of them balancing the weight together, so that neither one need bear the entire load. Now she was stuck with the full yoke while Ianto slowly got more lost in the labyrinth of his own thoughts, his tasks done on an autopilot that maybe he thought she didn't notice. Or maybe he didn't notice. Or maybe he didn't care. But she was sitting there alone. And she wanted him back.

"Ianto," she said.

"I'm tired, Gwen." He rested an elbow on his knee and held his head up. "But I can't sleep. And I can't think properly. I'm trying to do what needs to be done, and I'm not doing it right."

"You're doing fine, Ianto," she said, uncertain, feeling as though she was walking on a balance beam, wavering over Unhelpful and Stupid.

He was quiet for a long while. Somewhere, a wind chime trilled with hollow-sounding bells, the sound swept across the cemetery until it thinned out and disappeared.

"She never lived," he finally said.

And he was right. A pile of rocks toppled into Gwen's stomach as the idea sank in, the finite and definite knowledge that in her long and eventful life, so full of surprises and strangeness and beauty, Tosh had never lived. She had never lived the way she wanted to live, the way she saw life to be and craved for. She had worked quietly and skillfully at a job that was fulfilling and often mad, but she had never gotten the only thing she really wanted, and it had never occurred to Gwen before, and her hand tightened on Ianto's arm as she stared down at the grass.

"She never got what she wanted," Ianto said, repeating her thoughts. "She's the only one of us who really knew what she wanted, and she never got it."

Tears obscured Gwen's vision, but she blinked them away. She took a few deep breaths, eyes closed, putting this new information somewhere that didn't need constant analysis, that just was and was gone. But something occurred to her, and she opened her eyes and looked at him. "Did it ever occur to you that you could die without ever having lived?"

And from the way that Ianto looked at her, Gwen knew that it had never occurred to him at all.

"I'm not going to die, Gwen," he said, and suddenly he was there again. There was no distance. His face was earnest, eyes clear and blue and looking at her and finally, finally present. She leaned against him, her head tucked against his shoulder, and pressed her face against the cloth of his suit, breathing in the scent of him, laundry detergent and old books and coffee, and she tried to memorize that scent, because it was occurring to her too, now. That she could lose him, the smell of him, the sight of him. She couldn't remember what Tosh smelled like, but all she could think of were cherry blossoms.

"You could," she said, muffled by his jacket and the threat of tears.

He moved his hand to gently tuck a stray piece of hair behind her ear. "So could you," he all but whispered.

Then the sky broke, and everything else broke, too.

She didn't know if he was crying, because the rain poured down and made everything look like it was crying, the trees were crying, the grass was crying, but with his arms around her she could feel the stutter of his chest against the stutter of her own, and she knew that _she_ was crying, sobbing over the grave of someone she should have known better, loved better, done more for. Sobbing into the shirt of the person she would kill for, would die for; the person she knew would do the same for her in the space of heartbeat.

The person who could be taken away from her in the space of that same heartbeat.

"I love you," she said, loud enough to be heard over the rain and the crack of thunder, pushed out by a sobbing breath.

And Ianto didn't say it, couldn't say it, but she felt it pass between them as he held her tighter against him, and the hard rain drummed against their bodies, and the grass, and the stones with their plaques. The thunder cracked again, and the lightning flared, and he loved her even without the words.


End file.
